getting it right in (food) journalism

Last week, the NY Times food section had an ambitious compilation of recipes that purported to “evoke” the typical Thanksgiving celebration of our 50 states plus DC and Puerto Rico.

Nice idea, but they blew it. Or at least some of it. From today’s corrections:

An article last Wednesday recommending a Thanksgiving dish from each state, with a recipe, contained numerous errors.

The recipe from Connecticut, for quince with cipollini onions and bacon, omitted directions for preparing the quince. It should be peeled, cored and cut into 1-inch chunks. An illustration with the West Virginia recipe, for pawpaw pudding, depicted a papaya — not a pawpaw, which is correctly depicted above. The introduction to the recipe from Arizona, for cranberry sauce and chiles, misstated the origin of Hatch chiles. They are grown in New Mexico, not in Arizona.

The introduction to the Delaware recipe, for du Pont turkey with truffled zucchini stuffing, referred incorrectly to several historical points about the Winterthur estate. It was an ancestral home of the du Pont family, not the sole one; it was established in 1837, not in 1810; the house was completed in 1839, not in 1837. The introduction also misstated the relationship of Pauline Foster du Pont to Eleuthère Irénée du Pont. Pauline was the wife of Mr. du Pont’s grandson, not his daughter-in-law.

And, finally, the label for the illustration for the nation’s capital misspelled the District of Columbia as Colombia.

Add to that the odd-sounding recipe for Broiled Grape Salad which the entire state of Minnesota seems to be at pains to disavow, you’ve got a few giggles at The Grey Lady’s expense to go with your turkey.

Comments 2

The surprising thing is how often the NYT recipes are wrong–I’ve tried several over the years that were complete disasters. (One gingerbread recipe called for 4 cups of flour instead of, I imagine, 1 cup???–I didn’t think about how ridiculous this was until it was too late.)